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Saturday, 29 November 2014

Wheel of time finally rolls in their favour

12 people with disabilities get to intern with tech major

When 12 wheelchair bound people gazed in wonder as they made their way
inside the huge glass doors of a building recently, they were scripting a
new chapter in the city's techsector: They were part of the first batch
of an internship programme rolled out by a tech-park for persons with
profound disabilities! EMC Corporation near Doddanekundi on Outer Ring
Road ushered in the disabled persons as part of "Redefine Abilities" -a
one-year internship programme geared at taking disabled persons one step
closer to their career path and making them financially independent.EMC
India, with the support of Enable India, a non-profit organisation, had
identified 12 interns for both technical and non-technical projects.

The excitement was evident when they stepped in early this week. While
many maintained that they were always intrigued about what happens
behind the glass facade of the swanky buildings that houses IT
companies, 45year-old Arun Adhyam, who suffers from cerebral palsy,
said: "I want to be a part of an MNC because it will help me become
punctual." He is joined by Avinash Sonnad who added: "Not just that, I
want to prove myself." Son nad is a cerebral palsy patient who has
completed his BCA course from Christ University. The Redefine Abilities
pro gramme was jointly con ceived by Deepa Narasimhan -a profoundly
disabled per son herself who works at EMC. In an interaction with
BANGALORE MIRROR on why she started this programme, she says: "I felt
very successful at my workplace and this is where we decided to bring in
more people and help them become as independent as I feel."

Simply put, a profoundly disabled person is someone who suffers from
multiple dis abilities, making that person heavily dependent on other
people. For example: 30-year old Pradeep Sinha from Kol kata is both
deaf and blind. The only way he communi cates with people is through
sign language, holding hands with the speaker. However, the interns pre
sent proved to be tech savvy and used a variety of assistive tools such
as speech recogni tion software, word predic tion software, magnifiers
for better viewing and even a de vice which uses eye control for
navigating the mouse in computers to keep pace with grasping everything
they were being taught. The tech nological assistance was pro vided by
charitable trust En able India, co-founders of the internship programme.

Most of the interns in the group had no experience in the
corporate sector. Some of them made their living through part-time jobs
or tak ing tuitions. Here they made their first foray into the corpo
rate world by learning appli cations related to TeamView er, Skype and
Dropbox to communicate with each oth er, as the programme was set to go
virtual after three days.